It is very rare for an UltraHD release to come out in Australia ahead of the rest of the world, in fact I can’t think of this occurring before at all yet here we have a very high profile release almost a month before the rest of the world.
Ready Player One comes to UltraHD Bluray via Village Roadshow in Australia in two versions, the standard UltraHD and also an UltraHD Steelbook exclusive to JB HiFi.
I enjoyed Ready Player One in cinemas more that I initially thought I would, It’s a great piece of nostalgia filled fun, which is all I really needed from it. The movie was a visual feast at the cinema and I was looking forward to see how it translated to the UltraHD format.
With the majority of the film being completely CG I had pretty much always assumed that we would be looking at a 2K DI here, which definitely seems to be the case as the visuals, although crisp, lack a certain amount of sharpness that a native 4K DI would have shown. This is not a massive let down as I could see the budget easily being blown if they committed to doing that many CG shots in native 4K.
One of the things I love about this film is that although the sequences within the Oasis are fully digital, the outside world is filmed with beautiful 35mm film. This produces a great contrast between the two worlds, with the real world employing the organic look of film (with Spielberg’s stable of washed out colours) and the Oasis looking crisp, vibrant and distinctly digital.
The sequences shot on 35mm show some great grain retention and although not the sharpest presentation detail is well resolved and looks beautifully filmic on this UltraHD release.
Colour wise this release looks adequate although I don’t have a HDR compliant TV at this time so I was unfortunately unable to review the HDR colouring.The film has a great 80’s themes soundtrack with a fantastic score which really shines here and was a great listen.
In the end I am quite happy with the purchase of this release and although it does not reach the heights of detail of native 4K DI’s the film still stands as one of my favourite looking 2K sourced titles.
Ready Player One is currently out on DVD, Bluray, 3D & UltraHD in Australia and is coming to other countries at the end of July / early August.
